For scribes, I got good profit selling [Mysterious Fortune Card]; on Gurubashi Whiptail stacks are around 150g, and milling 10 stacks provide around 60 [Blackfallow Ink] and 10 [Inferno Ink]. I've sold the card for 25g on average, topping about 45g each card sometimes, making it almost free to cast [Darkmoon Card of Destruction] (now that [Volatile Life] is cheaper too), which can sell very high depending on your server. I've seen Winds cards sell for over 5k, and since you can profit from both inks inscription seems like a pretty nice profession to have right now.

I don't know if the teleporting underground goldfarmers have moved in, or what, but ore prices have taken such a sudden tumble on my server (Daggerspine-US) that I was able to pick up well over a hundred stacks of obsidum for 40g or less. Last time I looked prior to this, it was more like 100g per stack.

This is well below the "vendor value" of the ore that you'll get if you prospect, cut the uncommons, and vendor them, so there should be a floor on ore price which is higher than this. I'd recommend keeping an eye out in case such a sudden drop occurs on your server.

Regarding underground miners, at least Outland-EU are rife with them, making it likely they are present on most active servers. But it is a crowded server so the ore prices haven't dropped that much to my knowledge.

Thanks for posting that information, but your calculations for the expected return per stack don't check out. I get the following (and it mirrors my anecdotal experience milling):
Whiptail, Twilight Jasmine per stack: 2 Ember expected = 1 Inferno ink, 12 Ashen expected = 6 Blackfallow ink ---> 1.6 Inferno/stack
everything else: 1 Ember expected = 0.5 Inferno ink, 10 2/3 Ashen expected = 5 1/3 Blackfallow ink ---> 1 Inferno /stack

So if you pay 140g per stack of Stormvine, you can pay 224g per stack of Twilight Jasmine and so on. As an aside, Cinderbloom is the most efficient herb on my server if you discount the milling time. I can get it for 80g/stack, while the high-end herbs rarely drop lower than 200g and never lower than 160g.

I find it very odd that blue level gems vendor 3.75g cut while green levels are 9g cut. I have not known a rare item type be cheaper to vendor than the common one before. Has anyone questioned this with anyone to see if this is some sort of error or intended?

If not, then the average minimum price for ore in certain cases you would not want blue gems, and strangley could make obsidium more atractive at a bare minimum "vendor" price if all gems are vendored than elementium with a higher % of blues than with elementium. This is of course in the extreame situation where ALL the gems you prospected are vendored, still strange however. (Yellow gems for example on my server are now selling uncut for as low as 5-6g with even some cut going for 8g, cheaper than the common gems)

Edit, Also that perfect versions of green level gems are also still 9g, where as previously you could vendor them for a higher price than the normal versions. E.G WoTLK green level where 25s uncut, 50s cut and 1g perfect. So purchasing gems even above 50s with the view of cutting and vendoring could still yield cash. Purple common gems where a prime example, as see stack after stack for sometimes as low as 30s each.

Thanks for catching that. Your math is indeed correct; I was not properly dividing Ashen Pigment by 2 for Blackfallow Ink yield.

It is indeed odd. In WotLK, purple, blue and green gems vendored for 9g, 4.5g and 0.5g, respectively. In TBC, they vendored for 6g, 3g, and 0.25g. Uncut green gems sold for 0.25g in both cases. The fact that green gems in Cata sell for 5g uncut and 9g cut is out of line with the progression and looks a lot like an oversight, although it's anyone's guess whether it will be rectified at some point.

What's everyone thoughts are about how to use those last Inferno Inks?

Where do you see prices going this weekend? Up because people are rushing to complete decks or down because scribes are dumping cards? And is it worth it to make the cards or just sell the inks? I don't see Stone cards selling at all so I'm inclined to sell them as inks.

Either way I'd definitely want to find a way to dump them this weekend because I see these cards being worth maybe half of what they're worth now this time next month. I figured that

1. Casuals start gearing for raids which means they'll need gold for gems, flasks, enchants, and what not so I expect to see an uptick in gathering, pushing herb prices down.
2. Raid trinkets and valor trinkets become easier to get, DMCs no longer carry the same exclusivity as the best way to get 359 trinkets.
3. Overall market deflation that's inevitable with every expansion cycle.

What are your thoughts?

I've been selling [Inferno Ink]'s mainly because people will soon enough find out that the darkmoon card trinkets on Cataclysm are in no way what they were in Woltk; they are good specially pre-raid, but I really doubt people will use them for as long as they used Greatness, so the price will probably drop as soon as everyone find that out.

After trying my hand in the card market, on Tuesday I switched to selling the ink. When there is a gold rush, sell shovels.

I calculated profit margins/costs from buying and milling herbs to either convert into cards or into ink for sale, based on my server's market prices for herbs, inks and volatile life. On my server, when buying Cinderbloom etc. at <= 7.5g per herb, converting to ink has yielded Inferno Ink at about 65% of market price, and alternatively will create a card at about 55% of average card market price. But the big difference is the liquidity in the two markets. The ink is a guaranteed seller, the cards are far from certain and require a lot of babying and price-watching on the AH. With the cards you end up with an inventory of sludge ("of Stones) after selling/trading your desirable stuff. Over the past few days I milled about 40k worth of herbs, and got about 60k back from selling ink, with much less stress and distraction than playing the card market.

I believe the market for cards/inks will peak in the hours before the Faire closes. There are a lot of procrastinators out there who will start getting desperate. Market for individual cards and inks will then surely crash once the Faire closes. In the 3-4 days after the Faire closes, there should still be a number of desperate buyers who missed the Faire and will pay a premium price for completed decks that were turned in at the Faire. (Or at least that is my hope; I'm holding onto a Darkmoon Card: Volcano to put on the AH on Sunday.) When the next Faire comes in February, card/deck/ink prices should again rise, but unlikely they'll recover to the levels they are now. It might be a good speculative play during the mid-January lull to snap up bargain-priced individual Waves/Embers cards and hold them until the next Faire.

I think there's good money to be made in the near future with raw Shadowspirit Diamonds. With the new meta gems announced but not yet live, I can easily forsee a crush of people wanting to get them as soon as the patterns are dropped and the cuts are learned. Hopefully I can get my hands on a cut and sell it early, but worst case there will be lots of people buying the uncut gems off the AH and just spamming trade. Regardless, there will be lots and lots of dps wanting new meta gems. Either Transmute a bunch using current green gem/ore prices to your advantage, or buy the Shadowspirit Diamonds at current prices and hold them. In either case, that market is going to take off.